Radical Atheist

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“I belong to a gospel choir. They know I am an atheist but they are very tolerant. Ultimately, the message of gospel music is that everything’s going to be all right. If you listen to millions of gospel records – and I have – and try to distil what they all have in common it’s a sense that somehow we can triumph. There could be many thousands of things. But the message… well , there are two messages… one is a kind of optimism for the future rather than a pessimism. Gospel music is never pessimistic, it’s never ‘oh my god, its all going down the tubes’, like the blues often is. Gospel music is always about the possibility of transcendence, of things getting better. It’s also about the loss of ego, that you will win through or get over things by losing yourself, becoming part of something better. Both those messages are completely universal and are nothing to do with religion or a particular religion. They’re to do with basic human attitudes and you can have that attitude and therefore sing gospel even if you are not religious.”
Brian Eno in an interview with The Guardian

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It’s Friday, the day we start planning the next two days; 48 hours to call our own, two days of focusing on our personal lives.

And far too many of us will waste several hours of that time adding new ringtones to our phones and downloading apps. 

Keyboard Cat is here to feed your addiction.

keyboard_cat_ringtone (MP3)

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“Atheism” and “agnosticism” are both poorly understood terms. Gnosticism and agnosticism deal with knowledge. Theism and atheism relate to belief.

Agnosticism, as defined by its creator, Thomas Henry Huxley, is similar to skepticism. It’s a means of examining reality that says, “show me”. Show me the evidence that leads to a certain conclusion, show me the process of getting from point A to point Z that supports the contention that point Z is true. Knowledge should be based on truth and truth claims should be examined skeptically/agnostically to judge their merit.

Atheism is a rejection of the beliefs of those who claim that there are or have been gods. We do not accept the explanations and substantiations offered by believers in support of their beliefs.

I am an agnostic atheist. Agnosticism is the tool I use to examine truth claims and atheism is the conclusion I’ve reached in the matter of belief in gods.

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After nearly 20 years on an impersonal commercial strip, the Cathedral of Christ the King moved to a quiet residential neighborhood in the northwestern edge of this metropolis. Church leaders were eager to be part of a community.

Then, on Palm Sunday 2008, they started ringing the church bells every half hour during the day.

The complaints soon began, so church leaders cut back the tolling to once per hour. They put up Styrofoam to muffle the sound. But they didn’t see how they could stop tolling the bells. “We ring our bells as a part of our worship, just like singing, praying and preaching the Word of God,” they wrote in a statement.

The only force that could silence the bells was City Hall.

Prosecutors filed two charges against the head of the church, and last month Bishop Rick Painter, 67, was convicted of disturbing the peace.

Some communities, wary of bells, parochial schools and bustle, have tried to keep out churches with zoning changes and public hearings. But officials with the Alliance Defense Fund, a religious liberties legal group representing the church, said the case is the first they know of in which criminal law has been used to keep a church quiet.

“It’s frankly a little bit astonishing,” said alliance attorney Gary S. McCaleb, contending the case violates the church’s 1st Amendment freedom to practice its religion. “It’s very clearly an expression and outworking of their faith.”

But Phoenix officials and some of the church’s neighbors see it differently. “It wasn’t an isolated incident. It happened repeatedly,” said City Prosecutor Aaron Carreon-Ainsa.

Al Brooks, who lives behind the church, offered a more vivid description. “We were living in a bell tower.”

Due to an error, the first bells rang at 6 a.m. on Palm Sunday rather than at 7 a.m. as intended. The bells rang the hours and sometimes played hymns. They rang for no longer than one minute and fifty seconds, every half-hour, until 9 p.m. Neighbors began coming in to talk to the church soon after.

Painter said the church was sensitive to the complaints. They eventually cut back to hourly bells, 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. They took a sound reading and found the bell registered 67 decibels — the volume of a regular conversation.

Some neighbors liked the bells, church leaders said. They heard from people who set their clocks by it, and a postman who used it to time his rounds.

But, Brooks pointed out, none of those people lived next to the bells. He and other immediate neighbors contacted a company that manufactures electronic church bells to ask what distance they should be played from residences. The response: 400 feet.

Brooks’ house is 40 feet from the building with the bells.

The trial in front of a municipal court judge lasted only a few hours. In the end, Judge Lori Metcalf gave Painter a 10-day sentence — suspended as long as the bells remained quiet and the bishop stayed out of trouble.

She permitted the ringing of bells only on Sundays and certain church holidays. (Source – L.A. Times)

Here’s what I don’t get. Why the “only on Sundays” exemption. The complaint wasn’t over what day of the week they were ringing the bells. I don’t see where the story implies the bells rang on any other day of the week. Evidently they only rang them on Sunday. It was the frequency of their ringing that was being challenged.

I use to live a block away from a Viet Namese church. They broadcast their services over loudspeakers on their roof clearly aimed out at the community. I considered it rude, let alone presumptive. They never asked if I wanted to listen to them chanting and singing. The only saving grace was that Viet Namese is a musical language, so it was unbearable to a lesser degree than had it been Fred Phelps or the Pope.

Could you imagine being an atheist living across the piazza from the Vatican? Oy vey.

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I despair when I encounter people like this in RL and on the net. They should be the punchlines of jokes, they ought to be caricatures. But they’re real, they really exist, really vote, really have kids and most likely an active sex life. THAT RIGHT THERE PROVES THERE’S NO JUSTICE IN THIS LIFE!!

I feel so sad for humanity knowing people who “think” like this are still around. These are the guys who fly planes into buildings, or would if they could and if Christian fanatics had as big a pair of balls as the Muslims. Instead they kill doctors and innocents, justifying it by blaming it on god, using an idea to excuse their inhumanity.

Beliefs like these stifle human progress, they retard our evolution. Religious belief is essentially retarded (note: I’m not calling believers retarded, not explicitly anyway). It can never advance in understanding past its origin 2000 years ago (or less depending on the religion). At the time Christianity was invented, for example, it proclaimed itself to be the ultimate truth, the zenith of knowledge. Implicit in that belief is the sad fact that nothing more could be added to the “wisdom” in the Bible. Access to further knowledge and understanding of our universe was closed. Everything you needed to know, would ever need to know, was in the Bible. Of course not just anyone could read and interpret the holy writings. We needed a priest class to act as intermediaries between just the words claimed to be god’s and humanity. Others claimed to be intermediaries between the god itself and humanity. Lay people, ministers and theologians have been at each other’s throats ever since.

Humanists and atheists don’t accept limitations on knowledge. We confess our ignorance of so much. But we, like everyone else, have a standard that has to be met when it comes to what we’ll accept as truth. Not absolute truth, conditional truth is as good as it gets. Our standards are high, our tolerance for bullshit low. If we’ve listened to what you have to say (and I don’t know an American who hasn’t heard what Christians have to say), and we’ve dismissed it as inadequate, don’t be obnoxious and try to imply there’s any aspect to your religion we haven’t already considered and discarded. It’s a done deal. Unlike Christians, we don’t want to answer 21st century questions with 2000 year old answers. Humans have developed tools and techniques unknown to ancient goat herders that allow us to answer questions we didn’t even have 5 years ago.

Yet humanity, by and large, prefers to embrace superstitions rather than face realities.

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Something fun for you (I sincerely hope) and challenging for me is coming to Radical Atheist this August.

Stay tuned for further details.

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At some point in the (near, I hope) future the psychiatric community is going to have to admit that religious belief is a potentially harmful delusion.

Religious belief has caused parents to turn against children and children against their parents. Differing religious beliefs have caused some of the most violent and deadly wars humanity has suffered. Religious belief has produced as much or more damage to humanity as it has good deeds.

Too often we try to soft peddle our attitude toward religious belief, we don’t want to offend. We’ve had too many people blaming their religious beliefs for their inhumanity recently. It’s unacceptable. We shouldn’t accept religious belief as an excuse for inhumane acts.

The church can judge its own by its own standards, I don’t care. But its affect on people is a contributing factor of the crime, not an excuse for it.

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I spend quite a bit of time in forums. I can attest to the reality of the following video. I have seen these same comments, most likely copy/pasted from some religious site, being posted as either evidence for the Christian god or as a challenge to atheists.

They really write this shit. Now here’s what this inanity sounds like when spoken by young, white, apparently sane young men:

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After years of extensive research and absurd experiments involving cheap hookers and blow, I’ve finally come upon the simple solution for making atheism acceptable to the majority of humans on this planet. It doesn’t involve asking atheists to change any of their current opinions, even so-called hard “there absolutely is no god” atheists can can do this. It’s so easy an agnostic can do it. Nor does it require theists to change their attitude toward non-believers.

Because from now on there are no non-believers. We’re all believers.

Atheism is now theism, atheists are theists. Everybody believes in whatever god you believe in.

Now it’s quite obvious that theists differ dramatically in how they interpret their scriptures and dogma. They even differ in their passion for their beliefs. At one end of the scale are those who thank Jesus or Allah after every other sentence while at the other end is the Jew who eats a ham sandwich but believes he’s wrong to do so (not that the thought of that stops him). Theists are all over the place.

So what place in the broad spectrum of religious belief exists for ex-atheists?

The Unitarians are notorious for their nearly-non-theistic theology. So we former-atheists are just a bit more secular than the UU. We accept that gods are possible. It’s just that we believe the probability that gods exist is extremely low, so low that it becomes nearly impossible.

See what a simple and elegant solution this is? Theists can no longer dismiss us from the tent; we’re now a part of the theistic clan, one big happy family. We might be the weird, possibly retarded cousin 6-times removed who grew up in a cave with wombats who insists on attending every family reunion, but we’re still family.

We humanists had it all wrong. We were trying to convince theists that we are all humans, we all belong to the human family.We should have been turning that around and stating that all humans are theists, just to varying degrees. After all, the vast majority of people believe that you cannot say with absolute certainty that gods do not exist. Conversely it must then be true that you cannot say with absolute certainty that gods do exist. So absolute (100%) belief and disbelief are positions one cannot reasonably hold. You can approach within the smallest increment to 100 and 0%.

Thus those who were once called atheists and humanists are actually just the least convinced theists you can find. I’ll let the other theists fight among themselves for the position of closest to 100% convinced.

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To accept any brand of theism entails accepting certain assumptions as established fact. All religious belief systems have a creation story. It may be interpreted literally or figuratively, but the underlying assumption that the universe was created by a particular god must be accepted as literal truth and fact to be a member of any particular sect of religious belief.

In rejecting religious belief, atheists also dismiss the presumption that any god created the universe.

However, beyond implying the rejection of religious creation stories, atheism does not provide further guidance as to what to think about the manner in which the universe came in to being. Unlike the vast majority of religions, atheism isn’t a belief system. Atheism is a single point of disagreement with other people over the idea that it’s plausible that any particular god exists. There are many things that atheists believe and disbelieve. The fact we’re atheists only pertains to a single one of the disbeliefs.

Some atheists just don’t give a damn about philosophy or science. They could care less how we got here. They have lives to lead and no time for foolish speculation about things we can’t possibly know at this point in time. We tend to call folks like this practical and level headed.

Others of us are fascinated with understanding how everything works and what it all means. There are many names for us, one or two are complimentary. We follow the findings of scientists, philosophers and thinkers who enlighten us and increase our knowledge, which we expect to result in wisdom.

Accepting scientific explanations about life and the universe and philosophical musings on our place in nature are not obligatory. No atheist is obligated to agree with science. It’s an option, one of many that don’t entail believing in gods.

Scientific explanations of reality are incomplete and never absolute. Some people can’t tolerate a lack of absolutes, so they invent them then proclaim their inventions to be absolute. “It is because we say it is.” Not a convincing argument. My standards for belief and agreement are too high to be satisfied by religious belief. I was a theist, I’ve been there, I’ve walked that road in total sincerity and with unbridled passion for many years. Theism in general and Christianity in particular are not unknown to me. I’ve made their arguments and fought for their validity. I’m completely comfortable with dismissing them as irrelevant in the quest to understand nature on their own merits. Having scientific and philosophical explanations that hold together better and explain nature in terms that don’t require a suspension of good sense and skepticism is an added bonus. It’s nice to have but isn’t the reason for my rejection of belief in gods.

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